DHADAK

It was the launch vehicle of new kids on the block i.e. Late Sridevi & Boney Kapoor’s daughter – Jhanvi and the Stepbrother of Shahid Kapoor – Ishaan Khatar.

It was produced by one of my favourite Production Houses i.e. Karan Johar’s Dharma Production.

It was a remake of the highly acclaimed Marathi Film – Sairaat.

The promos looked fabulous, well all big budget production house films have excelled in this front.

It was based and shot in my UDAIPUR which was recently voted as the 3rd best city in the world.

For us the movie aficionados it was all the reasons to watch this one First Day First Show, after all didn’t want the other reviews to cloud my judgement about DHADAK.

The plot is about this lead pair who while studying in college flirt and fall in love much to the despair of both the families as the girl is a royalty from ‘UNCHI JAATI’. The first half is all about these innocent flirtations building up to the point where they caught and eventually run away from Udaipur far away from the families’ wrath all this happens before the interval. The second half is about them restarting and building their life in a new city and culminating into a climax that is shocking.

The movie touches many themes such as Casteism, Rajasthan’s erstwhile Rulers adapting to new India – being part of Democracy / Electoral Politics and Honour Killing. The songs are great but they seemed forced in the movie, I mean haven’t Dharma Productions heard of the concept of songs as a medium of taking the story forward. This is the least that can be expected from them.

The first half is engaging as we have actual young actors playing out as students and not some 30+ and Udaipur is shown in all its glory. Then second half is all downhill after that nothing seems to be happening to keep me engaged. Ishaan Khattar stands out as innocent naïve one of the pair while Jhanvi has shades of her mother but she definitely has a long way to go. Someone also please tell Ashutosh Rana to act in films in which he is not always angry.

Another jarring point as a native of Udaipur is that Rajasthan is not always to be equated with desert that is just in the north western part of Rajasthan, like that the filmmakers tried showing in the opening sequence. We love our kachoris, ghewar and churma but an eating competition is way tooooo stereotyping!! And where did the dialect come from?? There is no one standard Rajasthani that is spoken in my state, what we speak in Udaipur is Mewari which definitely doesn’t sound like it has been spoken in the film. All the above stereotyping would have been forgotten only if the movie was entertaining.

If you are interested in watching a movie on honour killing I would recommend Qayamt se Qayamat Tak or Sairaat if you have Netflix (I for one is soon watching it) instead. This film is about the heartbeat but the heart is definitely missing for it is lost somewhere in the adaption stage.